British Television Drama

JONATHAN BIGNELL is Senior Lecturer in Media Arts at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He has written Media Semiotics: An Introduction (1997) editing Writing and Cinema (1999) and recently written Postmodern Media Culture (2000). He was joint Project Director (with Stephen Lacey) of 'The BBC Wednesday Play and Post-War British Drama', an Arts and Humanities Research Board institutional fellowship. - STEPHEN LACEY is Lecturer in Drama, Department of Film and Drama at the University of Reading. He is the author of British Realist Theatre: the New Wave in its Context, 1956-65 (1995) and of articles on contemporary British theatre and television. He was joint Project Director (with Jonathan Bignell) of 'The BBC Wednesday Play and Post-War British Drama', an Arts and Humanities Research Board institutional fellowship. - MADELEINE MACMURRAUGH-KAVANAGH is Lecturer in English and Film and Drama at the University of Reading and was the Institutional Fellow researching on the Arts and Humanities Research Board project 'The BBC Wednesday Play and Post-War British Drama'. She is the author of Peter Schaffer: Theatre and Drama.

'The book not only brings academics and TV professionals together in the debate about televised drama but also provides a probing, but not over-technical introduction to the field of British Television Drama to put alongside Nelson's TV Drama in Transition.' - Christian-Martin Czypull, University of Hannover, European Journal of English Studies

• Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Editors' Introduction Contexts; T.Garnett SECTION I: Editors' Introduction: Production Context Television Drama Series: A Producer's View; I.Shubik TV Drama: Then and Now; J.McGrath Sydney Newman and the 'Golden Age'; S.Sutton The 1970s: Regional Variations; B.Hanson Writing Television Drama: Then and Now; A.Davies 'The Age of Innocence'; A.Plater Playing Shops, Shopping Plays: The Effect of the Internal Market on Television Drama; D.Elgar SECTION 2: Editor's Introduction: Critical Constructions, Approaches to TV Drama Mapping the Terrain: Troy Kennedy Martin's Edge of Darkness; J.Bull Holding On: Signs of the City, The Motif of the Redemptive Journey in Tony Marchant's Holding On; P.Billingham 'What Truth is there in this Story?': The Dramatisation of Northern Ireland; E.Braun The Emancipatory Strategies of Reginald Perrin; C.Fox 'Run Over by One's Own Story': Genre and Ethos in Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective'; A.Hilfer Power Plays: Gender, Genre, and Lynda La Plante; J.Hallam Too Secret for Words: Coded Dissent in Female-authored Wednesday Plays; M.Macmurraugh-Kavanagh What Do Actors Do When They Act?; J.Caughie Multiple Authorship in TV Drama: Trevor Griffith's version of The Cherry Orchard; J.Tulloch Conclusion Select Bibliography Index